Nicolas Sarkozy back in court. But this time it is an extraordinary affair, which has all the makings of a state scandal between the former French president and Muammar Gaddafi. French justice accuses Nicolas Sarkozy of having received money from the Libyan “guide” to finance the electoral campaign which will bring him to the Élysée in 2007. Nicolas Sarkozy is being prosecuted for corruption, criminal association, concealment of embezzlement public and illicit financing. He faces ten years in prison. The story broke in 2012, following revelations by the French information site Mediapart, which led to the opening of a legal investigation the following year. Fabrice Arfi is the head of the Mediapart Investigations division, he is also the one at the origin of the revelations. He answers questions from Sidy Yansané.
RFI: Muammar Gaddafi and Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior, met for the first time in 2005. And when he was elected president two years later, he managed to free the Bulgarian nurses unjustly detained in Libya for years. years. This is where the honeymoon between the two heads of state officially begins. What were the reasons for this rapprochement?
Fabrice Arfi : The unofficial reasons, those which will populate the hearings of the historic trial, of the trial of the Sarkozy-Gaddafi affair, concern a history of compromise at various levels, whether diplomatic, financial, economic, in perspectives of hidden financing from Libya to France and in return, according to the legal accusation, for a whole bunch of favors that France granted to Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, from the moment Nicolas Sarkozy was elected president of the Republic.
Among these favors, for example, which are the most notable?
The most significant counterpart because it is the most dizzying from my point of view, is one of the Libyan dignitaries called Abdallah Senoussi, brother-in-law of Muammar Gaddafi and former head of the military secret services, and who is known to sinister memory in France, since he was sentenced in 1999 to life imprisonment for having blown up the DC10 airliner of the French company UTA. It was in 1989 above the Ténéré desert in Niger, and it left 170 people dead. Among the compensation, justice accuses the Sarkozy team of having, in exchange for money paid, promised to cancel the arrest warrant for Abdallah Senoussi, the subject of an international arrest warrant since his conviction in France. So we are going to have, for the first time in French political and criminal history, a case of terrorism, and not the least important one, which will find itself at the heart of a corruption trial.
And it is moreover this matter of terrorism which will largely contribute to the isolation of Libya at the international level. And the election of Sarkozy is also a great victory for Gaddafi because six months after this election, he is invited to Paris. We all remember his tent that he pitched in the courtyard of the Hôtel Marigny, located in front of the Élysée Palace. Do you consider that this is also a victory for Gaddafi?
Other democracies, of course, welcomed Muammar Gaddafi. But only France did it with such pomp, and for Muammar Gaddafi it was a total victory for which he was prepared to pay dearly. France, country of the French Revolution, of the Declaration of Human Rights, offered him a notability that no other Western democracy, liberal, as they say, was able to offer him.
Only four years later, it was the Arab Spring. A NATO coalition decides to support the rebels against Gaddafi. President Sarkozy is particularly determined. Remember that before the intervention, the Libyan guide “revealed” in the French daily Le Figaro having financed the campaign of his French counterpart. Do the investigations, both media and legal, make a link between the two events?
I am not one of those who consider that the war in Libya is a fabrication by Sarkozy aimed at whitewashing himself, but there are still questions that arise about the way in which the war was started. I remind you that there is a report from the British Parliament which called into question the lies which led to the outbreak of the war in Libya, in the wake of the Arab Spring, first in Tunisia then in Egypt. Questions which also arise about certain operations carried out in Libya, until the death of the dictator Gaddafi, the precise circumstances of which are still unknown today. But the fact is that the Nicolas Sarkozy of 2007 and the Muammar Gaddafi of 2011 are indeed the same two men of 2007 and 2011. If there is a secret that links them, this secret links the same two characters four years apart. ‘gap.
The death of Gaddafi, in still unclear circumstances, will above all put the Libyan arsenal at the disposal of a myriad of militias and jihadists, with disastrous consequences on the security level for Libya and the entire Sahel. You, who are an informed observer of French politics and who have worked for ten years on this issue, do you think, as many Africans think on the continent, that Sarkozy should also be heard on this aspect?
It is not up to me to say whether Nicolas Sarkozy should be judged at an international level. On the other hand, we can see that the reasons which led to the outbreak of war according to the British, although very willing under David Cameron to accompany Sarkozy’s war epic, were not accurate. We left a field of ruins behind us, and worse than a field of ruins, we left part of the country in the hands of Islamist jihadists, some of whom will then sow terror, including on the European continent. And it will indeed destabilize an entire region. But it was precisely the team of Nicolas Sarkozy and Nicolas Sarkozy himself who offered Muammar Gaddafi a welcome and favors that few countries in the world, almost none, offered him. And besides, it is very surprising to see today a Nicolas Sarkozy say to what extent Muammar Gaddafi was a terrible character, while the legal file reveals truly astonishing connections between his office, himself, and the former Libyan guide.
Related News :